Having basically exhausted my receive capabilities on the NDB and 630m band with the inverted L antenna (I still get a few new signals each month) , I went looking for an antenna that would push my listening limits. I have a lot of acreage handy so I thought about beverage antennas.
There are many good articles (and some questionable ones) on beverages. I purchased ON4UN’s Low-Band DXing and started there. KW2P’s Blog has some information on coax beverages and W8JI’s beverage page is packed with advice.
After much research and many hours with azimuth maps, auroral oval maps and design calculators I have settled on a plan for some 3 meter (10′) high 2-wire beverages in the bog near my house. You can walk in the bog with boots on and there is little standing water. I hope the ground resistance is not too low for a beverage to work effectively.
The image below (north is up) shows the complete layout. The build will come in phases so as not to work myself too hard!
The sparsely treed area is the bog. Power lines are 30 meters (100′) to the west of the house (N-S alignment) with nothing but bush and mountains for many hundreds of km (or miles) to the north and east.
Phase 1 will be the 90º – 270º (green) antenna. This will give me access to the east coast of North America (90º), something that eludes me at present. The opposite direction will hear the South Pacific and Australia.
At 400 meters (1300′) long, it is more than a full wavelength at 160m and about 0.6 wavelength at 630m. It should work quite well as long as my ground resistance is not too low … we’ll see how that goes.
Phase 2 will be the 120º – 300° (orange) antenna. This will face the American mid-west and South America (120º) with the 300º end facing Eastern Asia (Japan, Philippines, etc.).
Phase 3 (red) is the experimental antenna. It faces Europe at 30º and New Zealand at 210º. The reason it is experimental is that I live on the southern edge of the auroral oval. Europe is directly through that oval all of the time and I cannot hear stations on that side of the world with my present setup.
What will I hear on the beverage? I’m not sure but that’s why I want to build it …what will actually happen? The nice thing is, I can move the antenna bearing if I do not like the result.
I’ll leave this post with that thought and check in again with the 2-wire transformer boxes and feedpoint switch.
